1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an improvement to automated installations which make it possible to store and/or to make available various products, which installations, in the rest of the description, will be denoted by the expression "stores". It also deals with a novel type of truck making it possible to provide the displacements of the products inside such stores including a plurality of superimposed levels, which truck could possibly also be used for providing the displacements of products on just one level, for example the ground.
2. Discussion of the Prior Art
In numerous industrial fields, there is the problem of having to store products temporarily, this being true both for the company's own needs in terms of its business activity (raw materials, piece parts. .), and for the articles manufactured by the company which are to be stored temporarily before being made available to the user or purchaser.
Very numerous proposals have been made to date for producing automatic stores making it possible not only to limit manual interventions to a minimum, but also to store, in a given volume, the greatest possible number of products.
To date, the most widespread solution for producing automatic stores consists in producing units in which the storage zones are substantially in the form of "columns" of great height, subdivided in the vertical direction into a plurality of superimposed levels constituting rows of racks, or cells whose dimensions are a function of the products to be stored, these "columns" being separated from each other by aisles along which there move units commonly denoted by the expression "transfer loader" or "transverser".
In general, such stores therefore define three axes along which the products are displaced, namely:
X: longitudinal axis of the stores, of the furniture or columns, of the aisles; PA1 Y: transverse axis perpendicular to the furniture (columns), and to the aisles; PA1 Z: vertical axis. PA1 the said trucks being brought to a predetermined level by means of at least one lift unit, and each storage level including a set of rails forming networks, one pointing along the longitudinal axis of the stores inside each intercolumn space and the other pointing along the transverse axis; PA1 the autonomous trucks including two permutable chassis each equipped with sets of wheels, one of which can be associated with the rails pointing along the X axis, the other with the rails pointing along the Y axis, characterised in that: PA1 the said networks pointing along the longitudinal axis X of the stores and along the transverse axis Y consist of: PA1 a plurality of networks pointing along the longitudinal axis X of the stores inside each inter-column space; PA1 a single network pointing along the transverse axis Y perpendicular to and at the end of the inter-column spaces; PA1 the autonomous trucks including means (two-way forks) on which the product to be handled rests in order to position it in and extract it from a storage compartment. PA1 one of the chassis, termed "outer chassis", including driving and supporting wheels necessary for the displacements along the X axis, as well as rollers for lateral guidance along the two axes X and Y; PA1 the second chassis, termed "inner chassis", supporting the driving and supporting wheels necessary for the displacements along the Y axis, as well as the two-way forks on which the product to be handled rests (for positioning in or extraction from a storage compartment).
To date, as stated previously, in order to provide the handling of the products inside such storage units, equipment designers propose automatic or guided machines of the "transfer loader" or "traverser" type, which make it possible to take up and to store pallets or containers in the cells of the columns which constitute the lateral faces of each aisle. Such automatic handling machines all have in common the fact that they run either directly on the ground, or on rails fixed to the ground. They may or may not change aisle. They all include a lift system which makes it possible to bring the member for handling the pallet or the container opposite the cell in question.
Taking account of the fact that the height of the stores becomes greater and greater, these machines become very tall (it being possible for the height to reach several tens of metres), with, in particular, a substantial toll on their cost and on the need to have an increasingly restrictive geometry of, on the one hand, the pallet handler and, on the other hand, the ground.
In order to provide the handling of products on the ground, it has been proposed to produce autonomous trucks which can effect changes in direction, these trucks being either guided by rails or automatically guided and in general being equipped with one or more guidable wheels allowing them to effect turns. Such a design of truck therefore gives rise to the production of displacement circuits which, in the change of direction zones, involve a substantial surface area, given that the truck moves in a curve which consequently, decreases the zone available for actual storage, for a given surface area.
Moreover, such trucks can only be displaced on a single level and they cannot work equally well on several different levels.